Trump Opens Twitter App, Tweets Something Stupid About GDP (Again)

Donald Trump was back on Twitter Thursday evening proving “surely and definitely” that he still does not understand how GDP is reported.

This is a long-running and very possibly a deliberate misunderstanding on his part. It seems likely that someone has tried to explain it to him but it seems equally likely that he doesn’t want to understand this because that would mean he can no longer plead insanity when indicted in the court of public opinion for tweets like this one:

Yes, “many people thought it would be years before that happened” – if that’s true, then it’s not clear why they would think that, because it literally happens all the damn time:

At this point, he has repeated this so many times that you’ve got to believe he may understand it at some level, but he surely knows that his supporters won’t know the difference between a quarter and a year.

Writing about a subject is the best
way to educate yourself about it, and when I flick through past work I remember how much
they taught me, if no one else. Mainly they taught me that I didn’t know very much. But they
also taught me that most other people didn’t know much either. Thus, some key themes
which stand out include the illusory control of policy makers, the presumed knowledge of
those looking to them to actively do good, the ease with which we fool ourselves, and how
best to protect capital in the face of such unavoidable uncertainty. -- Dylan Grice